Our lab is growing! In our Three Questions series, we’re profiling each of our members and the amazing work they’re doing.

This post introduces Lucía Céspedes, a research associate at ScholCommLab. In this interview, Lucía tell us about her exciting work and encourages us to dare to write, rewrite, and publish, while letting go of the unachievable desire to read it all.

Q#1 What are you working on at the lab?

I joined the Lab in 2022 to work on a project related to the use of social media by physicians to communicate reliable health information and fight misinformation. It was a lovely way to reconnect with my background in Social Communication and Science Journalism after dedicating my PhD studies to Sociology of science. Since my current position at Érudit involves a lot of reflection and discussion about tendencies and practices of scholarly publication and open science, the Lab is an amazing forum to keep up to date with my colleagues’ research, share information, and just generally collaborate and support each other.

Q#2 Tell us about a recent paper, presentation, or project you’re proud of.

As a multilingual scholar and Linguistics nerd, I’m very drawn to analyzing how certain power structures of the scientific field are channelled through languages, and how those dynamics may be changing in the context of open science.

In a paper published earlier this year, we studied the coverage, accuracy and completeness of metadata about language of publication in OpenAlex. We manually verified the language of more than 6000 articles indexed in the database vis à vis the actual language of each full text. We found a much more diverse linguistic landscape in OpenAlex than in other more restrictive, more elitist indexes, which is great in terms of non-Anglophone scholars’ representation! Even so, this portrait of multilingual science could be even more accurately depicted with improvements in OpenAlex’s metadata quality. It was great to feel we were contributing to the development of a very promising new source of information – and, personally, coordinating such a large team was an exciting challenge.

Q#3 What’s the best (or worst) piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Let go of the illusion of exhaustivity – none of us will ever be able to read everything there is to read about a specific topic. At a certain point, you have to be confident enough to stop absorbing others’ texts and start crafting your own. And always remember that a first draft is just that, a first draft. It’s perfect just by existing, because its only purpose is to be the starting point from where your ideas will begin to take shape. Longer, more polished, better texts will follow! However, it’s extremely easy to get lost in the never-ending loop of revising and re-revising. So, as my thesis supervisor would say, start writing to stop reading, and commit to publishing to stop rewriting!

Check out Lucía’s Bluesky account for open access updates, science policy discussions, football opinions, and carpinchos [capybara] memes!

Read her publications on her ORCID profile.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab.5380